Here in the third year of our great drought, it’s as if we all are supposed to have the technical savviness of an MWD engineer.

Except that we don’t. We can’t, really. It can take a lifetime of learning to suss out the complexities of the provenance and the delivery systems of water in California.

But laypeople are having to develop at least a surface-level understanding of how water works if they are to be at all competent in making the kinds of decisions the body politic is charged with during this era of climate change on the one hand and cyclical drought periods on the other — the former probably compounding the latter. We are learning in recent weeks of climatologists’ predictions that this could very well be the beginning of a three-decade drought in the West. So we need to make informed decisions as we go to the polls in November to decide the fate of the $7.5 billion water bond recently approved for the ballot by the Legislature.

Farmers all around the world since the beginning of human agriculture have been those most affected by rainfall and access to water. And most Californians understand that water use in our state is divided between the residential and commercial users, mostly in urban areas of the state, and the farmers. Most of us also have a general understanding of the difference between the farmers with access to the huge flows of Sacramento Bay Delta water and those planting crops in our fertile yet relatively dry Central Valley in the areas south of Stockton, who mostly have to rely on water imported from Northern California.

Beyond that, it gets complicated, and never more so than in matters relating to the historic, pre-1914 water rights granted to several thousand Delta farmers who are in some ways beyond the regulatory powers of contemporary governmental bodies. Such a situation creates jealousies in a business defined by access to water.

Though often beyond the pale of ordinary rules, the Delta farmers still are overseen by the California Department of Water Resources and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Last month, in a story first reported by Matt Weiser in the Sacramento Bee, those agencies asked a state board that oversees how water is diverted throughout the state to investigate whether Delta farmers are improperly taking water that has been sent from upstream dams aimed at consumers in other regions of the state.

Because it’s so very hard to figure out exactly where water comes from once it is released into the marshes, estuaries, ponds, rivers and irrigation ditches of the 1,100 square miles of the massive Delta, whether the charge is true or not will be very hard to prove.

The water agencies acknowledge that they have no proof as such that runoff is being intentionally diverted from its intended users. All they know, they say, is that the water has gone missing. “We recognize that we’re suffering losses of storage, but we don’t have the data to determine precisely where,” DWR spokeswoman Nancy Vogel told the Bee.

The farmers call it mere harassment. They know nothing of the missing water, they say. The truth will come out in the, well, wash. But it’s interesting another claim of the farmers is that for complicated reasons involving weeds vs. crops and pooled water evaporating, “farming uses less water than doing nothing.” Californians have a lot to learn about water. Never again will we think of it as stuff that just naturally comes out of the tap, arriving simply, costing a mere trifle.